"Danse macabre" with Duo Pianists Madalina Danila and Hugh Sung

Madalina Danila and Hugh Sung perform a 4-hand piano version of "Danse macabre", Op. 40 by Camille Saint-Saëns and arranged by Wendy Hiscocks at the American Church in Paris on June 19, 2022, presented by The New York Classical Music Society.

The first version of this piece was a song composed in 1872 to poetry by Henri Cazalis (1840-1909) entitled Le Danse Macabre. Saint-Saëns expanded this into the famous symphonic poem in 1874, giving much of the vocal part to a solo violin, and using xylophone (then almost exclusively a folk instrument) to depict the rattling skeleton bones. (An effect he later echoed in the “Fossils” movement of The Carnival of the Animals.)

The text merges the legend of Death fiddling on Halloween as skeletons dance on their graves with the late Medieval tradition of the Dance of Death (Totentanz), in which all are equal, from king to peasant, and are led dancing to the grave.

Saint-Saëns put a fragment of the text on the front of his manuscript score, which has been translated (anonymously) in English scores as:

Zig, zig, zig, Death in a cadence
Striking with his heel a tomb,
Death at midnight plays a dance-tune,
Zig, zig, zag, on his violin.

The winter wind blows, and the night is dark;
Moans are heard in the linden-trees.
Through the gloom white skeletons pass,
Running and leaping in their shrouds.

Zig, zig, zig, each one is frisking;
The bones of the dancers are heard to clatter –
But Sst! of a sudden they quit the round,
They push forward, they fly; the cock has crowed!